Exploration

Archive: 'Tech' Category

I have a theory, one that I’m sure has been formulated by someone else much earlier than me, that all power users eventually get left behind. They get stuck in a highly-optimized box canyon of their own making, one that is perfectly tuned to their way of working and interacting with data and is of interest to precisely nobody else in the world.

Let me use myself as an example. I’m currently running OS X Snow Leopard, 10.6.8, with no intention of upgrading. This is because after Snow Leopard, there is no more Rosetta. That means that my preferred personal mail client, Eudora, will not work. Neither will Word 2004. Both are, in effect, upgrade deal-breakers for me.

But why would I hang on to such relics?

Well, Eudora has been my mail client for quite literally two decades, and thus it has two decades of archived mail that I can search very quickly and easily. I have tried out migrations to other clients; they crash trying to suck in 3GB worth of mail text in Eudora’s special format. I could simply declare a break and move on to a new client with no stored mail, but as soon as I upgrade my OS, even the archives will be inaccessible. This is a major barrier. There are possible solutions, but trying them is incredibly time-intensive with no actual guarantee of success.

As for Word 2004, I have it customized so that ⇧⌘S shifts keyboard focus to the Styles combo box. There I can type the name of the style I want and hit return. This is really important when I’m writing a book whose files eventually have to be passed off to a publisher’s production staff, whose toolchains depend on proper use of styles. O’Reilly in particular went to a lot of effort, back in the day, to create style who had vi-style shortcut names, so I can highlight a few words and type ⇧⌘S fc [return] to set the highlighted text in the “literal” style (used for property names and the like). Versions of Word after 2004 do not possess this feature. I own Word 2011, and often use it to view documents sent to me by others, but I can’t use it as an efficient book-authoring tool because it amputated a feature I use a lot.

So the objection isn’t a simple “I like what I know, dadgumit!”, though of course I do like what I know (we all do). The real problem is “I have built my workflow around these things, and breaking them is unacceptable”.

I hear similar complaints from my designer friends. They’ve gotten so expert at using a particular piece of software that they bemoan even the hint that it will get a significant ‘upgrade’—which often sounds like “break everything I do while likely adding a metric ton of crap I don’t need” to the power user—or even be discontinued. Although for the power user, discontinuing is often preferable; at least when software is discontinued, it works exactly as you expect for as long as you can keep it running.

The web doesn’t inherently fix this problem, either. When Twitter finally retired the API access points that Twitterrific 3 depended upon, my desktop Twitter client irretrievably broke. Why not upgrade to the latest Twitterrific? Because version 3 allowed me to display my timeline with all tweets collapsed, except for the currently-active tweet. It was an incredibly compact, high-density, useful interface. Version 4 does not permit it. no other Twitter client I’ve tried permits it. In fact, every other Twitter client I’ve tried has come off as cartoonishly clumsy and sprawlingly obtrusive when compared to the sleekness of Twitterrific 3—including, as I say, the newer version of the very same Twitter client.

Granted, that’s more of a UI preference than a functionality problem, but UI preferences are often what drive us to use things, or not use them. I’m much now less present on Twitter than I was before the break, and when I do go on Twitter, it’s either via the official Twitter client on my iPhone or via twitter.com itself on the desktop.

Getting back to my increasingly-aging OS version, it helps that, to echo one my long-time personal heroes Tim Bray, I have no particular interest in what’s come after Snow Leopard. Dragging window edges might be nice, but I’ve lived without it for a very long time and rarely ever missed it. (Not never, but rarely.)

Yes, the newer OS X versions have a whole bunch of hip new cloud features, but in my case that’s actually a bug, not a feature. I instinctively distrust cloud-based storage for a variety of reasons. The security concerns are pretty significant for me, and for that matter having everything stored remotely is a good idea only if I have 100% reliable network access everywhere I go. Well, I don’t (and neither do you).

But of course the rest of the world is moving in a different direction, leaving people like me behind. That doesn’t mean that the rest of the world has gone mad, or is wrong to move in the direction it does. This isn’t a querulous demand that everything be frozen in the spot I like because if it was good enough ten years ago, it’s good enough now. That’s not how the world works. What I’m doing here, if I’m doing anything worthwhile at all, is documenting the point at which I came to the end of my box canyon, pulled out a guitar, and strummed a quiet ballad to the memory of my own forward progress.

As I say, I think all this happens to every power user at some point or another. We become enmeshed in a web of interlocking dependencies, and sooner or later lock ourselves into a particular place. The odds of it happening increase with age, but that’s less a function of biological age than it is elapsed time. The younger you start, the younger you’re likely to reach this point.

I will have to exit my canyon eventually, of course—but when, how, and why all remain very open questions, and I do not look forward to the turbulent transition periods that are likely to follow.

First component is the pricing of the pre-books. Roughly speaking, each pre-book will be priced according to its length. The assumed base for the electronic version is $2.99, and $7.99 for the print version, with significantly longer pre-books (say, one where two chapters are combined) priced somewhat higher. How much higher depends on the length. It’s possible that prices will drift a bit over time as production or printing costs change, but there’s no way to guarantee that. We’re basically pricing them as they come out.

At the end of the process, when all the chapters are written and bundled into an omnibus book edition, there will be discounts tied to the chapters you’ve already purchased. The more chapters you bought ahead, the deeper the discount. If you bought the pre-books direct from O’Reilly, then you’ll automatically get a discount code tailored to the number of pre-book you’ve already bought. If you bought them elsewhere, then O’Reilly’s customer service will work to create a comparable discount, though that will obviously be a slower process.

The second component is: how much will the codes cut the price of the final, complete book? That I cannot say. The reason is that I don’t know (nor does anyone) what minimum price O’Reilly will need to charge to cover its costs while taking into account the money already paid. I’m hopeful that if you bought all of the pre-books, then the electronic version of the final book will be very close to free, but again, we have to see where things stand once we reach that point. It might be that the production costs of the complete book mean that it’s still a couple of bucks even at the deepest discount, but we’ll see! One of the exciting things about this experiment is that even my editor and I don’t know exactly how it will all turn out. We really are forging a new trail here, one that I hope will benefit other authors—and, by direct extension, readers—in the future.

I’m really excited to announce that CSS: The Definitive Guide, Fourth Edition, is being released one piece at a time.

As announced last week on the O’Reilly Tools of Change for Publishing blog, the next edition of CSS:TDG will be released chapter by chapter. As each one is finished, it will go into production right away instead of waiting for the entire omnibus book to be completed. You’ll be able to get each standalone as an e-book, a print-on-demand paper copy, or even as both if that’s how you roll. I’ve taken to calling these “pre-books”, which I hope isn’t too confusing or inaccurate.

There are a lot of advantages to this, which I wrote about in some detail for the TOC post. Boiled down, they are: accuracy, agility, and à la carte. If you have the e-book version, then updates can be downloaded for free as errata are corrected or rewrites are triggered by changes to CSS itself. And, of course, you can only buy the pre-books that interest you, if you don’t feel like you need the whole thing.

I should clarify that not every pre-book is a single chapter; occasionally, more than one chapter of the final product will be bundled together into a single pre-book. For example, Selectors, Specificity, and the Cascade is actually chapters 2 and 3 of the final book combined. It just made no sense to sell them separately, so we didn’t. “Values, Units, and Colors”. on the other hand, is Chapter 4 all by itself. (So if anyone was wondering about the pricing differences between those two pre-books, there’s your explanation.)

If you want to see what the e-book versions are like, CSS and Documents (otherwise known as Chapter 1) has been given the low, low price of $0.00. Give it a whirl, see if you like the way the pre-books work as bits.

My current plan is to work through the chapters sequentially, but I’m always willing to depart from that plan if it seems like a good idea. What amuses me about all this is the way the writing of CSS: The Definitive Guide has come to mirror CSS itself—split up into modules that can be tackled independently of the others, and eventually collected into a snapshot tome that reflects a point in time instead of an overarching version number.

Every pre-book is a significantly updated version of their third-edition counterparts, though of course a great deal of material has stayed the same. In some cases I rewrote or rearranged existing sections for greater clarity, and in all but “CSS and Documents” I’ve added a fair amount of new material. I think they’re just as useful today as the older editions were in their day, and I hope you’ll agree.

Just to reiterate, these are the three pre-books currently available:

CSS and Documents (free) — the basics of CSS and how it’s associated with HTML, covering things like link and style as well as obscure topics like HTTP header linking

Values, Units, and Colors — fairly up to date, including HSL/HSLa/RGBa and the full run of X11-based keywords, and also the newest units except for the very, very latest—and as they firm up and gain support, we’ll add them into an update!

As future pre-books come out, I’ll definitely announce them here and in the usual social spaces. I really think this is a good move for the book and the topic, and I’m very excited to explore this method of publishing with O’Reilly!

Last Thursday was the first episode of The Web Behind, which was also episode #35 of The Web Ahead, and I couldn’t really have been much happier with it. John Allsopp made it brilliant by being brilliant, as always. To spend 80 minutes talking with someone with so much experience and insight will always be an act of pure joy. and we were beyond thrilled that he used the occasion to announce his Web History Timeline Project—a web-based timline which anyone can enrich by easily adding milestones.

The episode is up on 5by5, where there are a whole bunch of links to things that came up in the conversation; as well as on iTunes—so pick your favorite channel and listen away! If you are an iTunes listener, Jen and I would be deeply grateful if you could give the show a quick review and rating, but please don’t feel that you’re somehow obligated to do so in order to listen! We’ll be more than happy if people simply find all this as interesting as we do, and happier still if you find the shows interesting enough to subscribe via RSS or iTunes.

Guests are lining up for the next few shows, which will come about once every other week. Jen is preparing a standalone web site where we’ll be able to talk about new and upcoming episodes, have a show archive, provide show information and wiki pages, and much more. Great stories and perspectives are being uncovered. Exciting times!

Jen Simmons and I are very pleased to announce that our first guest on The Web Behind will be none other than John Allsopp.

Hailing from Sydney, Australia, John by himself has seen and done more on the web than most web teams put together. First encountering the web in the early 1990s, he built one of the very first CSS tools, Style Master, and a number of other web development tools; published a wealth of information like support charts and free courses; wrote the deeply insightful and far-seeing article “A Dao of Web Design”; influenced the course of the Web Standards Project; and founded a successful international conference series that continues to this day.

We’re incredibly excited to have John as our inaugural guest, and hope you’ll join us for the live recording this Thursday, September 20th at 6pm Eastern/3pm Pacific. That’s also Friday, September 21st at 8am Sydney time, and 2200 UTC if you want to calculate your own local offsets. The time zone dance is the reason we’re recording the first show at that particular time. Moving forward, the plan is to record on Wednesdays, usually mid-afternoon (US Eastern) but sometimes in the morning—again, depending on the time zones of our guests.

Be able to say you were there when it all started: please join us for the live recording, and subscribe to get the finished podcasts as they’re released. We already have some great guests lined up for subsequent shows—more on that as we firm up dates and times—and some interesting plans for the future. We really hope you’ll be there with us!

Whenever I meet a new person and we get to talking about our personal lives, one of the things that seems to surprise people the most, besides the fact that I live in Cleveland and not in New York City or San Francisco, is that I have a Bachelor’s of Art in History. The closest I came to Computer Science was a minor concentration in Artifical Intelligence, and in all honesty it was more of a philosophical study.

To me, history is vital. As a species, we’ve made a plethora of mistakes and done myriad things right, and the record (and outcomes) of those successes and failures can tell us a great deal about how we got to where we are as well as where we might go. (Also, from a narrative standpoint, history is the greatest and most authentic story we’ve ever told—even the parts that are untrue.) The combination of that interest and my ongoing passion for the web is what led me to join the W3C’s recently formed Web History Community Group, where efforts to preserve (digital) historical artifacts are slowly coalescing.

But even more importantly, it’s what has led me to establish a new web history podcast in association with Jen Simmons of The Web Ahead. The goal of this podcast, which is a subset of The Web Ahead, is to interview people who made the web today possible. The guests will be authors, programmers, designers, vendors, toolmakers, hobbyists, academics: some whose names you’ll instantly recognize, and others who you’ve never heard of even though they helped shape everything we do. We want to bring you their stories, get their insights and perspectives, and find out what they’ve been doing of late. The Mac community has folklore.org; I hope that this podcast will help start to build an similar archive for the web. You can hear us talk about it a bit on The Web Ahead #34, where we announce our first guest as well as the date and time for our first show! (Semi-spoiler: it’s next week.)

Jen and I have took to calling this project The Web Behind in our emails, and the name stuck. It really is a subset of The Web Ahead, so if you’re already subscribed to The Web Ahead, then episodes of The Web Behind will come to you automatically! If not, and you’re interested, then please subscribe! We already have some great guests lined up, and will announce the first few very soon.

I haven’t been this excited about a new project in quite some time, so I very much hope you’ll join Jen and me (and be patient as I relearn my radio chops) for a look back that will help to illuminate both our present and our future.

It’s a little bit hard to comprehend just how incredible a year we’ve had at An Event Apart. Our colleagues in the audience as well as on stage have been consistently sharp, engaging, and all-around amazing, and I don’t think Jeffrey and I could thank everyone enough even if we were given three lifetimes to tackle the project. With all seven shows this year selling out (some months in advance), we’ve taken the next step and have scheduled eight shows next year, a figure that occasionally causes me to go a little short of breath at the sheer wonder of it all. I think back on the hundred-odd people who filled the room at our very first event, tucked away in the upper back corner of Philadelphia’s Franklin Institute back in 2005, and can scarcely believe how far we’ve come.

If you’re inclined to join us in 2013, and I really hope you are, here are the cities and dates:

As was the case this year, all eight of 2013’s shows will feature a mix of new and familiar speakers presenting all-new talks shedding light on old problems and new ideas. Thus not every show’s lineup is yet complete: while we already have some speakers confirmed and announced for every event, we’re leaving the later shows in the year open so we can add fresh speakers and timely content.

Since all eight shows went on sale last month we’ve already had a bunch of people register, so you should definitely get those approval processes moving now if you want to avoid being shut out. We had lengthy waiting lists at every 2012 show, and there were very few cancellations. It never feels good to turn people away, but the venues’ capacities are what they are!

Being a part of An event Apart has been an amazing experience for me and for so many people, and our overriding goal is to make 2013 even better. I hope you’ll join us!

If you really want the TL;DR version, the results are largely the same as they’ve been in the past. The gender ratio, for example, is still in the vicinity of 5-to-1 male-to-female, with half a percent answering Other (a new option in the 2011 survey). Most respondents are in the age range 19-44 and live in the United States. And so on. That might sound like I’m bored by the results, but their very consistency even as the number of respondents has dropped over five years fascinates me.

It did take quite a while to publish the results. I feel personally very bad about the delay, because I run the numbers and it just took me a long time to get them run. Partly, I admit, I put it off because some of the numbers in previous years were a royal pain to generate, thanks in part to the way the data is formatted and in part because of the fine slicing that was done. This was finally addressed through various means, and now the report is done. I can’t thank Sara Wachter-Boettcher enough for her keen editing eye and firm strategic oversight, not to mention writing all the commentary text to accompany the charts. If not for her, the report might still not be done. And of course without the unwavering support and dedication of Jeffrey Zeldman, the survey might not have existed at all.

So we’ve done this five times, and the results are consistent. What now? There is much to discuss, and the answers aren’t yet clear; but I do know that this project brings me more professional pride than almost anything I’ve ever done. It tells us a lot about ourselves—and in a profession that is often characterized by single-person “web teams” and distributed offices, one which may never have a certification process or other form of registry, that’s something valuable. Thank you for helping us see ourselves a little bit more clearly.